The Game Trilogy (20 page)

Fuck!
he thought in panic, struggling to his knees and spitting gravel, then forcing his paralysed legs into action. He abandoned the track and headed off straight across the field in the direction of the bus stop. Dust and soil swirled up around his feet and the stubble tore viciously at his trouser-legs.

Scratch-bang-scratch-bang-scratch-bang.

HP was running as he had never run before, that much was certain.

At least five hundred metres to salvation. The plane was almost halfway through its circle. His heart was pumping so hard that he thought it would burst in his chest. He could taste blood in his mouth, and his pulse was pounding in his temples.

Then he heard the roar of the engine get louder again as the plane dived towards him Alfred Hitchcock-style, and now the noise was even more ear-splitting, if that was possible. He ran on in panic, trying to zigzag to present a harder target, the way you did in Counterstrike. But this was IRL, and not some fucking computer game! The plane was coming closer and closer and nothing seemed likely to divert it.

Suddenly he caught sight of something in the stubble a few metres ahead of him. It looked like a white plastic stick of some sort, about two metres long.

He didn’t really know where the idea came from, but just before the plane was on top of him he threw himself at the stick, grabbed it with both hands and with one end stuck under his armpit, something like a knight’s lance, he rolled over onto his back.

The plane filled his world, the roar of the engine was deafening. As the rush of air whipped his breath away he felt the stick strike something solid and then it was torn from his hands.

Then the plane was gone. HP rolled over onto his stomach again. The remnants of the shredded stick lay scattered a few metres away.

Must have hit the propeller, he thought as he struggled to his feet again.

The plane had started to climb again. But this time the engine didn’t sound quite so angry. It was rising and falling as if the engine was running unevenly, and HP could clearly hear a whistling sound that must be the damaged propeller.

The pilot was clearly having trouble, but HP didn’t wait to see how he was going to deal with it.

Instead he set off at full speed towards the bus stop which was now visible up ahead. As he got closer he saw a bus just passing the stop and he changed direction in an attempt to intercept it. He might just make it …

Then he caught sight of something from the corner of his eye and realized that the pilot had changed tactic. Instead of diving from a few hundred metres up, the plane was sniffing across the field, and HP could see the undercarriage almost touching the stubble.

This time it wouldn’t do any good to dive, he’d get his
skull crushed either by the wheels or the bar between them.

Terrified, he speeded up even more. He raced towards the road, seeing the bus come closer, and exerted every last bit of strength to beating it. The noise of the plane getting louder spurred him on.

He put one foot in the ditch which made him lose his balance, but he was running so hard that he carried on, stumbling up onto the side of the road, just in front of the roaring bus.

Then a shriek of brakes, a squeal of tyres and the aeroplane roaring overhead.

An instant later he was knocked over and everything went black.

‘Hey, man, are you okay?’

The voice was coming from far away and HP sat up with a jerk. For a panic-stricken moment he thought he’d gone blind, that he’d got brain-damage or something like that, and was condemned to a life of eternal darkness. But gradually his senses returned and he managed to open his eyes.

‘You okay, man?’ A young man in a uniform that was too big for him was leaning over him, and beside him he saw the faces of a couple of anxious old ladies.

‘You came out of nowhere, man, I hardly had time to brake but I don’t think you got much more than a knock.’

HP didn’t answer, just trying to get up was an effort.

The driver, an immigrant of about thirty or so, gave him a hand.

He did a quick check of his limbs, with satisfactory results.

‘We ought to call an ambulance,’ one of the old ladies trilled. At a guess, she must have been on the bus.

‘… and the police,’ the other one chimed in. ‘That plane …’

‘No ambulance!’ HP interrupted. ‘I’m fine!’

He was, too. Apart from the scratches to his face and hands, and the fact that the wind had been knocked out of him, he felt fine. The last thing he needed right now was a load of nosey cops.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled to the driver. ‘I misjudged it, my bad!’ he managed to say as his voice started to work again. ‘I’m fine, really!’

‘Great!’ the driver said in relief. ‘Maybe we should get going?’

He called out loudly, for the benefit of people still in the bus, ‘No damage done, ladies and gentlemen.’ Then he added, ‘Everyone on board!’ though there were just the two ladies standing anxiously next to him.

As he brushed the grit from HP’s back he whispered:

‘You’re not going to file a complaint, are you, man? I’ve already got one charge for speeding, and I need this job, you know?’

‘No worries!’ HP replied, starting to get a grip again. ‘Don’t worry, just let me off without paying and it’s all forgotten.’

‘No problem, friend!’ The driver smiled in relief and gestured invitingly towards the door of the bus.

‘You should just make it to the train, but it’ll be tight.’

HP nodded and collapsed in the nearest seat.

‘Did you see that plane, man? God, it was flying low!’

He could hardly remember the journey home. HP had completely exhausted himself running across the field, and if you add to that his close encounter with the bus, it wasn’t so surprising that he was shattered. He did actually try to stay awake and check to see if he was being followed, but it had been impossible. His eyelids just kept drooping and he dozed off. He ended up all the way out in Älvsjö and had to take the train back to his place.

When he eventually made it back to Slussen he was awake enough to do the secret agent trick to shake off anyone following him. But by the time he reached the little allotment cottage he was wide awake.

His heart was racing and adrenalin was rushing through his body and it was like he was reliving the whole thing again. For a few minutes he actually believed he was about to have a heart attack, that he was going to die out there in the cottage and his ant-eaten corpse wouldn’t be found until auntie showed up to close the place up for winter.

But then his galloping pulse finally calmed down and the fog in his head began to lift.

What in the name of fuck had actually happened?

Had
it really happened, IRL, or had he just dreamed it all?

It only took a quick glance in the mirror to write off the dream theory. Filthy, covered in scratches and the bottom of his jeans left in tatters by the sharp stubble in the field. It was a damn good job he hadn’t been wearing shorts!

The pilot of the plane really had been trying to bump him off, and he’d probably have succeeded if he hadn’t made it onto the bus. His pulse started to race again and he felt sick, and it took a few minutes and several litres of water before he felt he was back in control again.

His thoughts were churning wildly in his head, the tumble-dryer in there seemed to hit some sort of hyper-speed.

The Game, the assignments, everything that had happened to him – it was all just a betting game for bored rich bastards?

They’d pressed all his buttons, pushed his boundaries and got him to play along merrily. Was he really so fucking easy to deceive?

The alternative was obviously that Erman had been lying, and had just been talking a load of crap.

Okay, he was clearly a nut, but he didn’t seem like a liar. The hillbilly obviously believed one hundred per cent in what he had said, and most of it also fitted in with HP’s own experiences. The problem was that he just couldn’t take it all in, it was too much.

But if he split the story into two, it worked better. If he bit the rotten apple and accepted that he’d merely been a crazy puppet leaping happily into action whenever the Game Master pulled the right strings, and if he bought all the stuff about betting and the way the Game was set up …

If he did that, then the first part of what Erman had told him pretty much explained everything he had been through.

Even if it stung badly to accept that he had been some sort of court jester in a virtual casino, the explanation made sense, unlike the rest of the story. At least it kept more or less on the right side of crazy.

But he was still having trouble buying the conspiracy theory.

The idea that the Game spanned the whole world, took on all manner of dirty jobs and also had ears and eyes everywhere – that was impossible to take in!

Erman himself had said that he had reached those conclusions all on his own, not based on anything he had seen or experienced directly. Possibly one result of too many lonely hours spent out in that cottage with no contact with the civilized world. You really had to feel sorry for the poor bastard. Even if Erman had practically scared the shit out of him out there in the forest, HP still felt some sort of weird connection with Erman. They actually had quite a lot in common. The Game Master hadn’t exactly been particularly lenient towards either of them. Tracking them down, making them feel special and then, once the Game had had enough of their talents, dropping them like they were yesterday’s news.

So what if Erman had lost some of his marbles? To be honest, he was genuinely fucking grateful that the poor reclusive bastard had helped him along. Opening his eyes, and possibly even giving him a way of accessing the Game.

Whatever, he was feeling considerably calmer now. The nausea had almost gone and he was starting to feel hungry. Some Heinz baked beans was all he managed to find, and he ate them straight from the tin.

What about the plane, then, trying to cut him down? How the hell could you explain that?

No-one had followed him out there, he was absolutely certain of that, so what the fuck had happened?

Okay, in theory it
could
all have been a mistake. He and Erman were roughly the same height and had the same colour and length of hair. From a distance you might get them mixed up, and from a height of a couple of hundred metres it was probably impossible to tell the difference.

The nutter lived alone out there, so maybe the pilot simply assumed that the person emerging from the trees had to be Erman, – the description would have seemed to match.

That’s what must have happened!

Whoever it was in that plane, he must have had some beef with Erman, not him.

Maybe some angry neighbour or inbred local who had run into the psycho in the Co-op? And decided to scare the shit out of the crazy fucker, Alfred Hitchcock-style when the opportunity suddenly arose. Stuff like that happened sometimes, you just had to take a look at TV3. Christ, there was a whole fucking series about people who did shit like that …!

The more he thought about it, the more likely it sounded. Some sort of sick neighbourhood dispute that had got out of hand. It was a considerably easier to accept that explanation than the alternative.

‘Global conspiracy, my ass,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Yeah, right!’

He’d never even been close to falling for that.

Relieved, he leaned back in the kitchen sofa and turned on his laptop. There was nothing like a bit of television to make you forget your problems. You could always find some poor bastard out there who was in a worse state,
and made you feel better about things. Once everything had calmed down a bit, he’d think about what to do next.

Even before he heard the voice coming out of the speaker he realized what had happened. The local television news pictures were enough on their own for him to get it – the burning house, flashing blue lights and fire-engines parked among the nettles.

Half-digested baked beans all over auntie’s sink. HP was vomiting like a champion.

It had taken him several days to recover. He must have picked up some sort of virus or some other crap, he had a fever and the projectile vomiting didn’t let up until there was nothing left but bile.

As usual, it was Manga who came to his rescue, when he turned up to see why he hadn’t been in touch and found him flaked out on auntie’s rib-backed sofa. Totally fucking embarrassing, but Manga had shown he was a true friend. He’d taken him off to the Eriksdal pool so he could get cleaned up, then conjured up some clean clothes and rosehip soup, and he hadn’t even minded cleaning up the disgusting kitchen.

Yep, Manga was a true friend, a BFF actually. And from now on HP would actually treat him like one. To start
with, he’d call him Farook. If the name was important for Manga, then he’d use it from now on and stop taking the piss.

He’d had loads of dreams while he was sick, fevered dreams about all sorts of things. He was pretty used to weirdo dreams anyway, they almost came as standard a few days or a week after a decent trip. He’d read that the THC in grass got stored up in the fatty tissues of the brain and could make its presence felt some time afterwards, a bit like a bomb on a timed detonator. Often his dreams were spaced-out
Lord of the Rings
affairs with giant butterflies and talking trees, which was pretty cool.

But these dreams were different, far darker and less pleasant than his Miss Mary Jane fantasies.

He remembered one particularly vivid dream that involved him running naked through the Klara Tunnel. Erman’s charred, blackened corpse was chasing him on the flatbed moped, at the head of hundreds of stampeding, riderless horses.

The tunnel exit on Sveavägen was getting closer and closer, but his pursuers were gaining on him. His steps were getting heavier and heavier as the slope got steeper and steeper, and he realized that he wasn’t going to make it. The moped’s engine rose to a rattling falsetto, along with the clatter of hooves.

They’re everywhere!! It’s all a fucking Game!!
The corpse’s charred mouth howled, but the last word was distorted and bounced around him like an echo off the walls of the tunnel.

He woke up with his heart pounding in his chest just as the moped was about to smash into the back of his knees.

But now he felt better.

No fever, clean again, and he’d eaten his fill. Maybe his legs felt a bit stiff, but that would pass.

The question was: what was he going to do now?

He wouldn’t be able to move back into his flat for another week or so, evidently there was some sort of delay with the new door. In a way he was almost glad. There was no point denying it really, he wasn’t looking forward to moving back home. The fact was that after what had happened out near Sigtuna he was … frightened.

Yes, he’d admitted it. Henrik HP Pettersson, the man, the myth, the legend – was scared.

So the Game wasn’t just some sort of low-level anarchist pay-per-view YouTube rip-off like he’d originally thought, but something completely different, something considerably more unpleasant. The whole betting aspect was worse than he’d thought at first, he realized that now. Systematically pushing people to shift their limits of what was okay, consciously seeking out people who were easily manipulated, and then pushing them just to see how far they were prepared to go.

And all that, just because it was cool!

But the second part still seemed too incredible to be true. That the assignments weren’t just thought up at random but consciously designed to satisfy some anonymous customers? If that was true, and he emphasized the word
if
, then it meant that he and all the other players were being fucked over twice. They weren’t just jack-asses on speed, or internet tarts whoring themselves out for a few comments and virtual thumbs-up. They were also total fucking puppets!

Unconscious hitmen who knew nothing and were therefore easy to dispose of if the shit hit the fan. A load of patsies, stooges that no-one gave a fuck about, even if they tried to tell the truth. Because who was going to believe them?

The thought made him both angry and more than a little shaky.

The implications of a scenario like that were so massive he could hardly imagine them. Wasn’t it more likely to be Erman’s paranoid brain finally crossing the line between quaint rural eccentric and total fucking lunatic?

Right up until he had seen Erman’s cottage going up in flames, and doubtless Erman along with it, he had been prepared to believe that, but now he was seeing it in a very different light …

There was really only one way to find out for certain, so he decided to start with a bit of research.

One of the many Unemployment Service training courses he’d done his best to forget had been in the very subject that he needed to remember now. With a decent search engine you could take the world by surprise, he remembered that much at least …

Farook had helped him to set up the laptop, routing it through a number of anonymized servers that had popped up in the days before the IP-RED law came into force. From now on he’d be invisible on the net, a ghost-rider.

He opened one of the search engines and got to work. Erman’s note left him none the wiser.

Torshamnsgatan 142
was all it said, apart from a few nerdy passwords that just might, or might not, work if he ever managed to get in. The poor flame-grilled fucker could have added a bit more information, like what the company was called, or what floor it was on? Was that really too much to ask?

The address certainly matched a street in Kista, but didn’t really give him much more than that. It was a perfectly ordinary office building close to the E4 motorway, but that was all the satellite pictures had to offer. He found a list of small telecoms companies that either had been or were still based in the building, but none of them seemed to have the slightest thing to do with games or computers.

He didn’t really know what he had been expecting. Some sort of walled fortress maybe, or a secret address that couldn’t be found on any map? A bit like the National Defence Radio Establishment out on Lovön? But this seemed completely
halal
, with not the slightest hint of a mysterious organization or a secret server-farm. So either Erman had decided to give him a dud address for some reason, or, more likely, the Game had upped sticks and moved somewhere else.

Disappointed and without any great expectations, he decided to carry on looking into the rest of Erman’s theories anyway.

He tried typing in a few search words, like ‘inexplicable’, ‘failed investigation’, ‘unknown’ and got a few thousand hits immediately. He filtered out anything to do with UFOs, which reduced the number to about three hundred, then added ‘perpetrator’ as an option, which brought the total down to a more manageable quantity. A bit more clever clicking and he had a decent collection of incidents listed on the screen in front of him.

He scrolled quickly through them.

It turned out to be a right mixture of stuff, and for a few seconds he felt almost relieved. But then he started looking more carefully. And gradually things began to pop up which were, to put it mildly, disconcerting …